Artlyst - Christopher Clack: Connecting The Material And Immaterial

My latest article for Artlyst is an interview with the artist Christopher Clack who says that for as long as he can remember there has always been an element of religious imagery or content in the work has has produced:

'Art is, above all a practice. It is ‘doing’ and ‘living’. Religion, too, is a practice and something to be lived. Both have less to do with what we believe, and more to do with what we discover. This, I think, is common ground. What, if anything, do you see being built on this common ground? A place where religion looks more like art and art, more like religion.'

My visual meditation on Christopher Clack's 'Descent II' can be found here.

My other Artlyst pieces are:

Interviews:

• Peter Howson Artlyst Interview
• Marleen Hengelaar-Rookmaaker On The Legacy Of ArtWay
• Alastair Gordon A Testament To His Faith
• Katrina Moss Chaiya Art Awards Interview: Where is God in our 21st century world?
• Apocalypse Now: Michael Takeo Magruder Interviewed
• Jonathan Anderson: Religious Inspirations Behind Modernism
• Caravan – An Interview With Rev Paul Gordon Chandler On Arts Peacebuilding
• Art Awakening Humanity Alexander de Cadenet Interviewed
• Michael Pendry New Installation Lights Up St Martin In The Fields
• Mark Dean Projects Stations of the Cross Videos On Henry Moore Altar

Articles:

• Arnulf Rainer: 90th Birthday Exhibition Celebrated At Albertina Museum
• A Belonging Project And Exiles Loss and Displacement
• Robert Polidori: Fra Angelico Opus Operantis
• Art, Faith, Church Patronage and Modernity
• Contemplating the Spiritual in Contemporary Art
• Mat Collishaw Challenges Faith Perspectives With Ushaw Installation
• Waterloo Festival Launches At St. John’s Waterloo
• John Bellany Alan Davie Spiritual Joy and Magic
• RIFT Unites 17 Art and Science MA Graduates At Central St Martins
• Visionary Cities: Michael Takeo Magruder – British Library
• Van Gogh’s Religious Journey Around London
• William Congdon Holy Sites And The Kettle’s Yard Connection
• Mark Dean Premieres Pastiche Mass At Banqueting Hall Chelsea College of Arts
• John Kirby: The Torment Underlying The Civilised Facade
• Curating Spiritual Sensibilities In Changing Times
• Ken Currie: Protest Defeat And Victory
• Bosco Sodi: A Moment Of Genesis
• Bill Viola And The Art Of Contemplation
• Art In Churches 2018: Spiritual Combinations Explored
• Sister Wendy Beckett – A Reminiscence
• Guido Guidi: Per Strada Flowers Gallery London
• Peter Howson: The play is over – Flowers Gallery
• Camille Henrot: Scientific History And Creation Story Mash Up
• Nicola Green Explores Recent And Contemporary Religious Leaders – St Martin-in-the-Fields
• Art And The Consequences Of War Explored In Two Exhibitions
• Helaine Blumenfeld Translating Her Vision
• Sacred Noise: Explores Religion, Faith And Divinity
• Bill Viola: Quiet Contemplative Video Installation St Cuthbert’s Church Edinburgh
• The ground-breaking work of Sister Corita Kent
• Picasso To Souza: The Crucifixion Imagery Rarely Exhibited
• Michael Takeo Magruder: De / coding the Apocalypse – Panacea Museum
• Giorgio Griffa: The Golden Ratio And Inexplicable Knowledge
• Arabella Dorman Unveils New Installation At St James Church Piccadilly
• Can Art Transform Society?
• Art Awakening Humanity Conference Report
• Central St Martins in the Fields Design Then And Now
• The Sacramental And Liturgical Nature Of Conceptual Art
• Polish Art In Britain Centenary Marked At London’s Ben Uri Gallery
• Refugee Artists Learning from The Lives Of Others
• The Religious Impulses Of Robert Rauschenberg
• The Christian Science Connection Within The British Modern Art Movement
• Artists Rebranding The Christmas Tree Tradition
• Art Impacted - A Radical Response To Radicalisation
• The Art of St Martin-in-the-Fields and
• Was Caravaggio A Good Christian?

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Black Rebel Motorcycle Club - Question Of Faith.

Elizabeth Jennings & David Gascoyne: Mystical Experience and the Making of Poems

Elizabeth Jennings was a poet 'with an acute ability to combine concrete detail with abstract thought.'

'She was a bold and genuine versifier who conveyed both a sense of the hidden, and the fact that it was powerfully alive within her. For many years her favourite of her own poems was Fountain, from A Sense of the World (1958), which ends, It is how we must have felt / Once at the edge of some perpetual stream, / Fearful of touching, bringing no thirst at all, / Panicked by no perception of ourselves / But drawing the water down to the deepest wonder.

She later explained: "Art, for me, is that strength, that summoning fountain".'

Peter Levi stated that ‘[Jennings] may be the last poet of what used to be called ‘the soul’. 'One strand of her writing vitalizes English mystical verse in which she was steeped.' She wrote that 'a writer should neither preach nor conceal their creed.' 'For her, it was about taking a Christian lens to all subjects, following on from Chaucer, Milton, Dryden, Patmore, Hopkins and T.S. Eliot.'

Her faith contributed to some significant prose works. 'Every Changing Shape (1961) was a highly regarded exploration of the relationship between poetry and mysticism, while Christianity and Poetry (1965) considers the influence of religion on literature':

'Poets and mystics who have experienced some close, personal but supra-rational awareness of God have always carried away from such moments of illumination an increased subtlety, a profoundly original understanding of human experience and of the apparent contradictions even in the physical universe.’ … ‘Poetry is not rationalization but revelation and what is healing in it, both for the poet and his readers, is the ability to depict conflict at its most vulnerable point; with Hopkins, this point is the wrestling of man with God, - but also the surrender of man to God.' ’While frequently making parallels between poetry and religion, Jennings teases out the differences between the mystic and the poet: the poet wants to communicate ordinary experience while the mystic moves away from it.

In Every Changing Shape she gives a reading of Miserere by David Gascoyne: 'the only living English poet, apart from Eliot, in the true mystical tradition. If not directly influenced by it, his work undoubtedly leads back to the visionary poetry of Vaughan, Herbert and Traherne.'

She writes, 'in the magnificent sequence of poems called Miserere the poet, in lines of extreme lucidity, examines the depths of man’s guilt and the terror of life without God. The traditional “dark night of the soul” is transferred to Christ himself—Christ who is both the victim and the conquerer:

God's wounds are numbered.
All is now withdrawn: void yawns
The rock-hewn tomb. There is no more
Regeneration in the stricken sun....

This may it be: and worse.
And may we know Thy perfect darkness.

And may we into Hell descend with Thee.'

'Kyrie explores “the black catastrophe that can lay waste our world” and pleads:

Grant us extraordinary grace.'

'... it is the poet’s vision itself which sanctifies and radiates. The vision is the end and not the means and once it has been achieved, however fleetingly, it illuminates all things outside it while itself remaining locked in its own lyrical form and music.. This is the hard-won triumph of all great visionary poetry.'

Gascoyne said that 'The poet's job is to go on holding on to something like faith, through the darkness of total lack of faith...the eclipse of God.'

Niall McDevitt argues that the purpose served by Christian poetry, 'certainly at Gascoyne’s level, is not to proselytise or even to pray, but to wrestle with Christendom.' 'None of us can deny that we are surrounded by Christian architecture, iconography, educational and charitable institutions, tourist rubble etc. Our ancestry is Christian, our guilt is Christian and the wars we watch on television being fought in our name are Christian also. Even our nihilism is Christian. True Christian poetry is a critique of Christendom, which is, after all, the superstructure of capitalism. As poetry cleanses the language, it cleanses the superstructure':

'Involved in their own sophistry
The black priest and the upright man
Faced by subversive truth shall be struck dumb,
Christ of Revolution and of Poetry,
While the rejected and condemned become
Agents of the divine.' (Ecce Homo)

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David Gascoyne - The Return of the Reforgotten.

Greenbelt 2013: Life Begins ...

My Greenbelt this year was rather different from previous years as we took a commission4mission market stall to the Festival and this reduced considerably the number of events to which it was possible to go.

The flipside was that being on the stall was great for meeting friends, as well as making new contacts. So, for me, the highlight this year was definitely time spent with others; in particular the members of my cell group, most of whom were at the Festival and two-thirds of whom were able to share the excellent (if, at times, historically inaccurate and lengthy) Communion service together. Mary Grey, MacDuff Phiri and Barbara Brown Taylor as witnesses giving powerful personal testimonies were by far and away the best part of this service which was well led by the Wild Goose Resources Group.

As with last year's music lineup, I found little that felt like a must-see; that is until we reached the final day when I watched the wonderful Thea Gilmore, had Courtney Pine as background music to final contacts and conversations on the commission4mission market stall before packing up the stall to the strains of Duke Special. I first heard Thea Gilmore at St Martin-in-the-Fields as part of a Christian Aid event for Trade Justice and fell in love then with her intricate yet direct word play, stunning voice and classic rock and roll stylings.

The literature stream was where I spent the most time this year. Malcolm Guite is a great performer of verse as well as being an engaging raconteur plus a knowledgeable and insightful speaker on poetry. He read from his sonnet sequence for the church year, Sounding the Seasons, and from his forthcoming collection, The Singing Bowl. His recommendations are, therefore, well worth following up and he particularly commended Michael Symmons Roberts' Drysalter, a session I was unfortunately unable to attend. His talk 'Upending the Rainstick' explored the nuances of the Seamus Heaney poem with this title in order to argue for poetry as a means of upending our perceptions of reality.

Jon McGregor gave a thoughtfully dramatic reading, laced with humour, of short stories from This Isn't The Sort Of Thing That Happens To Someone Like You. A panel session chaired by Andrew Tate and comprising Debbie Fielding, Simon Jones, Katherine Venn and Anthony Wilson aimed to survey the literature of the past 40 years. Struggling with this vast undertaking generated some amusement but relatively little light while considering teen fiction, literary prizes, markets, morality and spirituality.

The participants listed their favourite book of the past 40 years: Dart by Alice Oswald (Catherine Venn); New Addresses by Kenneth Koch (Anthony Wilson); The Book Thief by Markus Zusak (Debbie Fielding); and any R.S. Thomas anthology (Simon Jones). Mark Oakley gave a moving talk on the effect which the poetry of R.S. Thomas had had on his life and ministry, drawn back to ordination training as he came to realise that absence is a vital and valid part of faith and ministry.

Absence, death of God and kenosis are all key concepts in Radical Theology which was discussed and debated in a stream developed by Kester Brewin, which involved John D. Caputo, Peter Rollins and Marika Rose. Caputo argued that Radical Theology is based on constant change because the impossible deconstructs every contemporary stance and space. In a panel session which ended the stream, Caputo used the example of Rosa Parks to suggest that this understanding leads to interventions in the present which seek to change reality in the direction of the impossible.

For me this makes sense of many of Jesus' sayings which are essentially impossible to fulfil. They are not literal demands but challenges to the comfort and stasis of wherever we currently are; the challenge to change is always before us, whether we are as saintly as St Francis or as evil as Hitler, not because of where we are but because the challenge and call is always out of reach e.g. be perfect just as your Father in heaven is perfect.

Whatever we do as a result is temporary and provisional because always deconstructable by the impossible. What we do, then, is to create temporary signs of the kingdom of God, the kingdom of the impossible. This leads to a position of doing the exact opposite to current teachings on Church growth. Instead of focussing on and doing a small number of things well, we are profligate in 'casting our bread on the waters' and create a number of projects/initiatives knowing that they are provisional and temporary.

This has been my underpinning ethos in life and ministry - discovered more through imagination, the Arts and the Way of Affirmation than through Radical Theology, apophatic theology and the Negative Way; all of which have been, for me, more recent interests - which has resulted in a past and current set of projects/initiatives which have/are lived/living and have/are died/dying. These include: Barking & Dagenham Faith Forum; Christians in the Workplace; commission4mission; Faith Communities Toolkit; Faiths in London's Economy; Living with other Faiths; New Life Church Centre & Noah's Ark Daycare Centre; Sophia Hubs; SOULINTHECITY Barking & Dagenham; and Voice of the People Trust.

Emotionally, I am constantly struggling with the birth pains involved with creating these temporary signs and also mourning the ending of them when they die, while understanding intellectually that this is the reality of their provisional and deconstructable nature. Genuinely living in change and flux is both creatively stimulating and emotionally draining at one and the same time. In reflecting on this year's Greenbelt event I think I may have understood and acknowledged this where I was unable to do so, although needing to do so, at last year's event.

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Thea Gilmore - This Road.
     

Book Review: The Sacred Community

Oxford Journals has just published my latest book review in The Journal of Theological Studies:

The Sacred Community: Art, Sacrament, and the People of God. By DAVID JASPER. Jonathan Evens The Journal of Theological Studies 2013; doi: 10.1093/jts/flt127

David Jasper is Professor of Literature and Theology at the University of Glasgow. He is the author or editor of more than twenty books, including The Sacred Desert: Religion, Literature, Art, and Culture, The Bible and Literature: A Reader, and The Oxford Handbook of English Literature and Theology.

"Liturgical, sacramental, and historical, The Sacred Community is a masterful work of theological aesthetics. David Jasper draws upon a rich variety of texts and images from literature, art, and religious tradition to explore the liturgical community gathered around — and most fully constituted by — the moment of the Sanctus in the Eucharistic liturgy. From art and architecture to pilgrimage and politics Jasper places this community in the midst of the contemporary world."

My earlier book reviews for the Journal of Theological Studies can also be found by clicking here, here and here.

 

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Arvo Pärt - Sanctus.

Christopher Clack: Not Exist

I recently penned some thoughts for a friend on some of the issues and ideas that I think the 'Not Exist' series by Christopher Clack opens up. Chris' work constantly raises questions for Christians and non-Christians alike. It is deliberately provocative but the surface impression is rarely what is at the heart of the work.

 

In 'Not Exist', therefore, I would suggest that he is not making the simple statement that there is no God. In part, I think he may be seeking to explore our reactions and responses to the statements on the billboards i.e. that the meaning of the work emerges in the response that we make to them. It is interesting too that that the people depicted in the images pay no attention to the billboards. In a society where apathy reigns, it may be that atheistic propoganda (such as the atheist bus ads), like that of Christian organisations, actually provokes little or no response from the general populace. Or maybe our eyes glaze over when we view most advertising. Like words going in one ear and out the other, we are maybe so used to advertising that much of it simply doesn't penetrate our consciousness.

 

On another level, though, Chris is interested in negative theology; the tradition of theology which says that whatever we think we know of God it cannot ever adequately express what God is and is like. Negative theology argues that we come to know God most fully by moving beyond all human descriptions, images or conceptions of God. Therefore, Chris' billboards could also be a call to experience God by putting to death all that we think God is or all that we think we know of God.

 

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Lou Reed - Dimestore Mystery.

 

Apophatic Ascension

Imagine how the disciples must first have felt when they heard that Jesus was planning to leave them in order to return to his Father. They had had an incredible roller-coaster three years of ministry together with him which had culminated in the agony of watching him die. They thought that they had lost him and that all their hopes and dreams had been dashed. Then there was the joy of the resurrection; the dawning realisation that Jesus was alive, was still with them and was not lost to them after all.

And then the Ascension. The Jesus that they thought they had regained leaves them. What was that all about? There was so much that they still had to learn? There was so much that they could have done together? Why? What happens at the Ascension is also similar to the words that Jesus spoke to Mary Magdelene when she became the first to recognise him after his resurrection. As she did so, she naturally reached out to embrace him but his words to her were, “Touch me not.” Why?

There is a strand of theology which is called ‘the Negative Way.’ Within this way of thinking about God all images and understandings of God are consistently given up and let go because they are human constructions that can only show part of what God is.

So, all talk of Jesus as shepherd, lamb, son, brother, friend, master, servant, king, lord, saviour, redeemer and so on goes out of the window because God is always more than the images that we construct to understand him. In saying that I was speaking of God as being masculine something which is, again, only a limited human understanding of God. Ultimately, God is neither male nor female but is Spirit and the Negative Way says that in order to encounter God as being beyond our limited imaginations and understandings we need to give up and let go of all our human ways of describing him.

The Ascension and Jesus’ words to Mary seem to say something similar. Jesus seems to be saying to the disciples, “Don’t cling on to me. Let go of me as you know me because, when you do, you will gain a greater experience, less limited experience of me. Don’t cling on to me. Let me go, because then the Spirit will come.”

To let go of what is safe and familiar and secure in order to be open to encounter what is beyond is both scary and exhilarating. But it is what Jesus calls us to and it is the way in which we encounter the Spirit in our lives.

The title of a Madness song, ‘One Step Beyond,’ has been a catchphrase that has developed real spiritual meaning for some of us at St John's Seven Kings over the last few months by challenging us to go further in living out our Christian faith, to go one step beyond where we are now in the way that we live as Christians. The Ascension seems to challenge us to go at least one step beyond where we are now in our understanding of God.

We need to leave the safety, security and familiarity of the past in order to encounter the new thing that God is doing in the present. When our aim is to hold on to and preserve what we had in the past, we put it in mothballs and it becomes a museum piece; something that is looked at but not used. The best way to preserve what was good about the past is to use it as the foundation and basis for going one step beyond. It is only when something is alive, growing, developing and changing that its past can feed its present.

So, the Ascension seems to teach us that nothing is sacred: not buildings, not books, not actions, not people, not even Jesus! We must always move beyond the place, space, people and understanding that we have now because that is how is how the Spirit comes!

Where is Jesus now?
Not here!
Jesus has left the building,
left the earth.
The last we saw of him
was the soles of his feet
as he ascended to heaven.

Where is Jesus now?
No longer God with us,
now God in heaven.
Distant,
removed,
out of our league.

What is he like?
We do not know –
we cannot see him!
What does he say?
We do not know –
we cannot hear him.
What is he to us?
We do not know –
he is not with us.

Where is Jesus now?
Here in body.
Here in what body?
The body of his people.
In the diverse,
differing,
fallible,
forgiven folk
who follow him
forming
his body on earth,
becoming his hands and feet,
his eyes, ears, mouth
on earth.

Where is Jesus now?
Here in Spirit.
Here in what Spirit?
The Spirit of love,
joy, peace
and hope.
The Spirit that
animates his body
into acts of service
and words of love.

Who are we
to be where
Jesus is now?
Only the struggling,
the failing,
the falling.
Only those calling out
for the Spirit’s
empowering.

Where are we
who are where
Jesus is now?
Only a fragment –
the minutest part -
of the glorious whole
that is his body
on earth.

How do we feel
to be where
Jesus is now?
Affirmed and humbled,
gifted and graced,
on top of the world
and
put in our place.

What does it mean
to be where
Jesus is now?
Like children
becoming adult
to grow up into him,
together
becoming him.
Each playing
our part
in the whole
that is Jesus,
Emmanuel,
God with us.

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16 Horsepower - Cinder Alley.